Pursuing journalism, please help critique my draft SOP

[vllee]

Hello everyone, it's my first application, so I'm pretty sure I will be prone to making mistakes in my grad application. I intend to apply at Berkeley which is tough, especially since the SOP and history statement can be a bit confusing and I'm about to interchange the two essays. I wrote my initial draft on my SOP. As I understand from the brief, it says I need to write why I wanted to get into this degree at this point in my career. I hope to get feedback on what I need to improve. Feel free to throw comments and suggestions. I'll be hiding some details here with an X. Thank you!

The interiors were dimly lit and the clinking of glasses dominated the noise inside one of the hottest restaurants in Manila, its roots tracing back to San Pellegrino’s 50 Best Latin American restaurants. I took a sip of the sparkling wine paired for the Panqueques, an Argentinian dessert known for overly sweet taste, as I listened to the restaurateur’s epicurean tales during the media event. Ironically, I sat beside a food writer who is working for one of the country’s top news organisations, while I had been covering the event as a minority blogger.

Barely running for two years, my small food blog had put itself alongside traditional news organisations and lifestyle publications in the metro. At the moment, X monthly unique visitors discover an array of restaurants and gastronomic adventures through my blog, a feat that veteran bloggers had achieved in five years.

There is no doubt that this new generation of content creation pushed me further down the road where my ambitions lie, what could have been a moonshot for me a decade ago. Today, traditional media no longer exists as an aspirational place for stories to be discovered. While people perceived journalism as a dying field, I believe there is no better time than today to become a journalist.

Delving first into the world of product development has placed me into a unique position that leverages strongly in the field of digital media. Building products allowed me to witness firsthand how digital communities have formed themselves around content that led people to consume stories at the palm of their hand while stuck in traffic on their way home. I believe journalism is at the centre of this paradigm shift from traditional thinking into digital thinking, where empowering platforms such as Youtube and Wattpad are now slowly becoming the legitimate storytelling medium. As we live in an age where a content creator is a director, producer, and screenwriter all rolled into one persona, the role of the discipline of journalism is to become the authority in telling stories the right way. Smartphones and wearables may come and go, and there will eventually be technologies that disrupt these platforms. But I believe storytelling remains the single most important element in the media industry. 

I am in the brink of my product development career where I realised that the only way for products to make a difference to users is for the product to tell a great story from day one. UC Berkeley’s School of Journalism will allow me to reach my goals in a sufficient length of time without sacrificing prestige, as journalism is a field that is best experienced in the wild as early as possible.

In a quasi-Jungian way, my personal and professional endeavours are slowly getting me to where I want to be, but pursuing a Masters Degree In Journalism will take me further down the road.